Sony Gives Us Pocket-Sized HD-Cam Goodness

Interested in taking the smallest High-Def camcorder with you on your next vacation? Not only are you in luck, you're the exact target audience for Sony's newest camcorder in their (seemingly) centuries-old "Handycam" line: the HDR-TG1.

If you're like most gadget aficionados, you are no longer satisfied with the picture-quality of your two or three year-old, standard-def Mini-DV video camera. It's probably been time to upgrade for a while and while there have been a host of HD cams that have come out over the past couple of years, most of them recorded on that old-fashioned Mini-DV tape. Using magnetic tape is positively last-century--it's all about writing directly to data, these days, and while many camcorders have that covered, Sony claims theirs is the smallest to do it while spitting out a High-Def picture.

The HDR-TG1 captures 1920x1080 resolution video and records it to Sony's proprietary "Sony Memory Stick PRO Duo or PRO Duo Mark2" format flash-based media. Flash-based cameras are better, in many users' minds, because they have no moving parts, unlike a hard-drive or DVD-recorder-based camera. In theory, that means longer battery life.

Those are not the only features of this little guy. According to Sony's press release for the HDR-TG1, the camera's body is made of titanium and has a "premium hard coating that makes it highly resistant to scratches and quite fashionable."

Yeah, that silver is almost as old-skool as Mini-DV tape--"fashionable" might not be the best word to use. However, the size is truly impressive--it's no joke calling this guy "little." This HD Handycam sizes in at a positively palm-sized 1.3 inches wide by 4.7-inches tall by 2.5-inches deep. It also comes with a Carl Zeiss 10x optical zoom lens and a 4GB flash card to get you shooting video right out of the box.

All in all, it's a nice device if you don't mind the somewhat utilitarian design. It would look right at home next to your MacBook Pro or other generic-silver-colored laptop. Astoundingly, the price for this tiny cam is a surprisingly tiny $900. The usual dynamic for camcorder-pricing is typically "the smaller you get, the more pricey" but $900 is a fairly reasonable price for an average-sized HD cam. It will be interesting to see how the HDR-TG1 behaves in the wild after it drops, sometime in mid-May, according to SonyStyle.com where you can pre-order it now.